London has been battered by 50mph winds that have felled trees and caused travel chaos. Powerful gusts swept across the capital as the Met Office issued a yellow "be aware" weather alert for most of the country.

I had Christmas with my family in Vermont. We have a beautiful house in the Green Mountains and every year I fill it with a sometimes uncomfortable mix of Yanks and Limeys. I've lived in New York City for nearly a decade and we bought the Vermont house because I missed my friends from England and wanted to have a place where my wife's friends and family and mine could meet and mix.

It is a cruel quirk of fate that as the clocks go back and we shiver as winter looms, our skin protests as well. It feels dry - thanks to the heating and the colder air - so you slather on more moisturiser, or use a thicker one. Then you get spots. So you stop using so much moisturiser and your skin feels tight and scaly. Join the club: you've got London Office Skin. And somehow every year it comes as a nasty surprise, just in time for the party season.

Libyan government forces today fired heavy artillery rounds at the centre of Colonel Gaddafi's home city as they launched their largest assault so far to capture the last major bastion of support for the deposed leader.

Water is not an industry to set the heart racing - not until something goes wrong and there either isn't enough of it, and we have hosepipe bans, or there's too much of it as rain, and raw sewage goes into the Thames. For the most part though, we take it for granted, and assume that supplying and, slightly less though, disposing of it must be a fairly easy way to earn a living.

Syria's government has showed off TV and still images of burned buildings and rubble-strewn streets empty of people in Hama, the epicentre of anti-regime protests, and claimed it was putting an end to the rebellion in the besieged city.

Tanks took over a main square in the besieged Syrian city of Hama and power was cut off as President Bashar Assad showed no sign of halting the intense military assault against anti-government protesters.